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Nietzsche would laugh at this whole debate. The man who declared "God is dead" and reveled in the chaos of creation wouldn’t waste tears on machines. He would ask: Does it make you stronger? Does it shatter your illusions? Baudelaire wept continuously for a dying world. Nietzsche would’ve set it on fire and danced in the ashes while your messenger's face is literally a meme of despair at the future he feared. His expression the ultimate irony, captured for all generations to see by the very photography he so despised. There he is, immortalized not by a romantic masterpiece, not by the hand of a true artist, but by the cold, mechanical lens he despised. His face: pinched, bloodshot, frozen in perpetual disdain thanks to photography. The "imbecility" he raged against was just the future laughing at him.
On my way to work and back home from my career, I have been met with two particular exits past train tracks repeatedly. Sometimes, the parking of those obnoxious trains makes me late for work - because Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a Zionist fucking asshole who passed a decision that it's not unlawful for them to park and block intersections. If I backtrack to an earlier intersection? There's the ass of the train when before I was blocked by the front of it. So, I have screamed against the inevitable, shouting pointlessly from my vehicle, and accomplished absolutely nothing in doing so. What would it matter if I were to get out and stand on the tracks of the parked train with my arms outstretched and shouting obscenities? Do you imagine I could stop it, just as the Luddites didn't stop industrialization? I would only appear to be a screaming imbecile.
What does that have to do with the subject of rising AI? A fruitless rage, and a mirror to what this whole topic is exactly. Today's AI skeptics won't stop machine learning. Photography didn’t just copy reality, it changed how we see, how we remember. The train will keep moving. Do we let it run over us blindly, or do we at least try to steer it? Photography’s artistic death never happened. No amount of hand-wringing, moralizing, or nostalgic weeping derailed it insomuch as Luddites never derailed trains. Every technological revolution has been met with hysterics, and every time, the hysterics lose. I still fucking hate trains.
History doesn’t just repeat itself. It laughs at the losers. The Luddites were smashed. Baudelaire died a syphilitic wreck, howling into the void as photography flourished. The contemporary doomsayers wailing about encroaching AI? They’ll be footnotes, just like the rest. Technological progress doesn’t care about your principles or mine. It doesn’t pause for ethical debates or aesthetic purity. It rolls forward on the bones of the protestors, leaving them choking on dust while the rest of the world adapts and moves on. Rage Against the Machine is not only terribly grating hip-hop drivel shouting ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!’ while hypocritically folding to Ticketmaster to enforce masks, it's also a pointless pursuit to rage against technological progress. The machine always wins.